Billionaire, I Am Not Your Wife! novel Chapter 277

Chapter 265: The Picnis-Logan Arrives

CAMERON

I saw him before anyone else did see him coming. This had become its own kind of instinct over the past months of us navigating through these difficult months, one always had to keep an eye out, after it was discovered Logan was willing to hurt anyone even Dante who stood in getting what he wanted.

It was one-fifty-two when I saw him crossing the grass toward us. I could tell immediately that something was already wrong.

I knew within three steps of watching him that this wasn’t the contained version. His walk was off unlike him. He was too fast, and too casual. He walked carelessly and uncomposed. This was nothing like the pacing I’d watched him deploy across a courthouse lobby weeks ago. His jacket was unbuttoned. It looked like he hadn’t checked it before leaving wherever he’d come from.

And underneath all of it, even from twenty feet away, I could see the flush of someone who had been drinking. The kind of drinking that didn’t show in a steady walk but showed everywhere else.

The eyes, the jaw, the particular looseness of a man whose self-control had stopped holding its shape hours ago.

“Sedona.” My voice was low, urgent, already moving. “Logan’s here. Early. He’s not right.”

She turned, followed my eye line, and I watched her face do the thing it did when threat assessment overrode every other instinct, already calculating, already moving toward Nick before conscious thought had fully caught up.

“I just want to see him,” Logan said, loud enough to carry across the whole gathering, loud enough that I saw Lake and Drew freeze mid-game thirty feet away. “That’s all. I’m allowed to see my own son in a public park.”

“You can’t be here,” Sedona said. “This isn’t your window. You know that.”

“He’s my son.” Louder now. Something cracking visibly was underneath the words. the careful contained performance I’d watched him hold across seventeen months had finally and completely failing him in real

time.

“I must be allowed to see my own son. Even if they want to take everything else from me.”

I moved between him and the rest of the group. Exactly the way I’d rehearsed it in my head a hundred times. Never fully believing I’d actually need to.

“Logan, you need to leave. Right now. Before this becomes something with consequences neither of us wants today.”

“Consequences, you think I don’t understand consequences? They’re coming for everything, Cameron. He laughed sarcastically. His face told a different story. His eyes dancing rom one end to another.

That was when Dante stepped forward.

The Pichic Logen-Arrives

Claim

He hadn’t moved much until then, I think he’d been calculating the same thing I was, the specific math of when stepping in helped versus when it escalated. But something in Logan’s voice stopped him.

“Logan.” Dante’s voice was even. Deliberately calm. The same tone he probably used to talk a frightened student through a difficult drin.

“Nobody here wants a problem. Walk back to your car. We can sort out the timing through Adaeze.”

Logan looked at him.

I saw it happen, the precise moment something in Logan’s face shifted from generalized fury into something narrower, something aimed. The man standing in front of him wasn’t an abstraction anymore, wasn’t a name on a financial trail or a target relayed through three layers of careful insulation. He was simply, physically, the man Logan had spent months trying to have killed, standing healed and recovered and entirely unbowed in front of him.

“You,” Logan said. Quiet now. Worse than the shouting had been. “You took everything.”

“I didn’t take anything,” Dante said. “She left before I ever…”

Logan swung.

It happened fast, the way these things always happen faster than the mind can properly track them, a blur of motion, Logan’s fist aimed somewhere toward Dante’s jaw, Dante already moving to deflect it with the trained reflex of a man who had survived one attack already and wasn’t going to be caught flat-footed by a second.

I stepped in.

I don’t fully remember deciding to. My body simply moved into the gap, the same way Dante’s had moved on his early morning run weeks ago, trained instinct outrunning conscious thought. I got a hand on Logan’s arm, redirecting the swing, and the three of us collided in a tangle of bodies that none of us had fully controlled.

Somewhere in the chaos of it, I heard Sedona’s voice, sharp, urgent, calling Nick’s name.

I didn’t understand, in that exact second, what was happening was focused entirely on Logan, on getting him contained, on making sure the swing didn’t connect with anyone who mattered.

୮

Then I heard the sound.

A child’s body hitting stone.

Not loud. That was the thing I would remember about it later, the specific horror of how quiet it actually was, a soft, terrible sound, nothing dramatic, nothing that should have been able to stop an entire afternoon cold.

I turned.

Nick had been running toward Sedona, away from the noise and the bodies colliding too close together, exactly the instinct any frightened child would have, get to your mother, get away from the danger. He hadn’t been struck. Nobody had touched him directly. But in the scramble of Logan’s swing and my redirect and Dante’s deflection, the three adult bodies had shifted just enough, just wrong, and Nick’s path had carried him directly into the low stone edge of the picnic table.

The Picnic Logan Arrives

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